Monitors in medical field are mainly used to check and display patient's physiological information in real time. Centrally a monitor includes only one main control board as the central control. There are many parameters used to measure human body signals and each parameter is for one measuring card. The data on these measuring cards is firstly processed by the main control in real-time and then patient's physiological signals are displayed for diagnosis.
The central monitoring server is a network server based on PC platform. Such server runs with a server software under CS or BS. The software can be connected with other monitors via the Ethernet. Consequently all patients' physiological information can be displayed on the monitor and it is easy for doctors to monitor the conditions of all patients at the same time. Meanwhile, doctors can also choose to operate the monitor of one patient through the central station software, e.g. manually starting the blood pressure measurement once. This type of central station server has been widely used in hospitals.
Centrally, one monitor can only display the patient's physiological signal provided by the parameter module of that monitor. A doctor has to use the dedicated central monitoring server if he intends to look through current physiological information of all patients at the same time. At present, some monitors provide the function to look through patient's information of other monitors using the same network, but only one-patient's information can be checked at the same time. In addition, they cannot store patient's physiological information of other monitors, thus it is extremely inconvenient.